MRF filter creation tool

[Nyerguds]

First version of the tool. The only thing this can do is preview .mrf files by applying the remap filter to a given screenshot.

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/project_stuff/2014/FilterCreator/filterviewer.rar (needs .Net 3.5)
(Includes a screenshot + all .mrf files for the desert and temperate theaters)

This is the desert shadow ("shade") filter:

It seems a lot of the mrf files (like the one used for the shroud edges) have multiple tables inside them. I think this is the shroud edges table (for Temperate):

The final tool will basically have 2 panes, one to view an existing MRF file on a pic like this already does, while the other will have a previewer for the new theater's screenshot, with a set of hue/brightness/saturation/etc tools to make the image on the other preview pane match the loaded mrf filter view. Then once it matches, it can generate a table out of that.

I'll probably allow saving these filter values as presets so stuff like for example the shadow under units can easily be generated once the filter values have been figured out.

[Nyerguds]

Progress...

I made the second (or rather, first) pane, which generates the actual remapping filter, using colour modifiers.

I will probably need Red/Green/Blue balance there too to get there.

I'm probably going to work with a system of a list of filters, so you can choose in which order the HSV / contrast / brightness / RGB balance etc filters are applied to the image.

The actual generation of the remap tables for the original palette already works, but there is no option to save them yet, and it also still needs options for excluding / forcing / exclusively using certain palette indices when generating the table (for example, it's known that the shadows in C&C palettes only use the first 15 of the last 16 colours on the palette)

[Nyerguds]

I stumbled upon a nice bunch of C# image manipulation tutorials and example code, and I think I finally got the full list of filters I need

[Kilkakon]

Great news!

[Nyerguds]

Now I need to make custom controls in C# for each of these filters... preferably with a common superclass to facilitate import/export of their data...

[Nyerguds]

Another small update: added a palette viewer to the right-side pane, which can show exactly which palette entries are used by the remap. It led me to discover that index #0 is practically always exempt from the remapping system and is always mapped to 0, and that the "light" filter (which I suspect is the flashing of units and buildings when targeting them) also uses only the shadow colours of the palette. It seems to basically be the same as the normal shadow, but with the brightness and contrast cranked up.

[Messiah]

What will be the sense of this? Is that a kind of master ambience to make night missions like in TS?

[Kilkakon]

It's to allow things like shadows and those circular movement pings to be changed with new theatres.

[Nyerguds]

Yep. They're the missing link needed to create new theaters. At the moment, it is possible to make new theaters, but only if you use the palette of an existing theater, and the corresponding .mrf files. Once you change the palette, filters like map shroud edges, white movement circles, the flashing of units and buildings when targeting them, and the shadow effects will all start messing up (containing wrongly coloured pixels), because they are achieved by reordering colours on the palette, and the .mrf files tell it how to reorder it to get the effect. So if the palette changes, the reordering is no longer correct.

So I'm making a tool where you can define each filter as a set of effects (contrast/brightness/colorize/etc) so it becomes simple to apply it to a palette for a new theater

[Nyerguds]

Started building the actual class structure behind the projects.

Basic structure:

• MorphProject : represents a .mrf file to generate. Contains a list of Filters.
• Filter: represents one remap table in a .mrf file. Contains a list of Effects.
• Effect: One single effect on the palette, like Darken, Colorize, Contrast, Gamma Correct, etc. Any number of these can be combined in any order to create the final Filter effect. The Remap info on the final tool will have a dropdown menu for adding these that will automatically be filled with all available effects in the program, without requiring any extra code adaptations from me when I add a new one

I've decided to create one generic "slider bar" custom control. From every Effect class, the program can automatically produce a custom control, by fetching the name to display, and a list of slider bar "definitions" in ValueSliderInfo objects. These ValueSliderInfo objects contain slider definitions like the name, the minimum value, maximum value, default value, etc. They will not only be used to generate the control, but also to transfer data between the user interface and the internal objects.

Sliders have a bunch of options that make them customizable. You can set on a slider whether it shows a "reset" button to reset to the default value, and you can add a checkbox that allows disabling that specific option (which I'll probably use for the Hue in the Hue/Saturation/Luminance control). Theoretically, by having a control with only the checkbox to enable/disable the effect, you can add a simple on/off effect as well. This can serve as extra option for a filter. One of these I will use is making the contrast filter's >0 part exponential instead of linear, which allows much higher contrast values on the same slider.

The next step will not be to make that interface generating part, though... next part will be saving and loading entire projects using an ini file. Since the ValueSliderInfo objects serve as both definition files and objects to transfer values from the UI to the internals, I already made a function that allows me to read or write the contents of such a ValueSliderInfo object from/to ini automatically

Man, I love software design

[Nyerguds]

First actual official release: MRF viewer

Yeah, sorry, this isn't the Creator tool, and I already released a beta viewer, but this is the final product for the viewer, made with the custom controls that are also in the main project.

(Also, the old viewer had a bug where it didn't close the reader for the image, making the image file unavailable for other programs until you closed the tool.)

Features:

• View the effects of the filters inside an .mrf file on a screenshot of the game
• View and save the screenshot's palette
• View and save the remapped palette
• See which colours on the palette are actually used on the remap filter
• Palette viewer shows tooltips showing the index and colour values of all colours
• Remapped palette viewer shows tooltips that indicates the original colour indices of the colours you see

Tool (+ test data):
http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/project_stuff/2014/FilterCreator/filterviewer.rar

Source:
http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/project_stuff/2014/FilterCreator/dev/filterviewer_src.rar

[Nyerguds]

The RA chrono vortex files revealed: SNOW_VTX.PAL opened in my tool

As I had predicted from the start, it's simply a 16-step fade to black. Nothing to do with the actual distortion animation.

This image shows the "view remap" function, btw, showing the actual effect on the palette. The previous pic showed the "View palette" function, with the checkbox to only show the actual colours used in the remap.

(I didn't put the .pal extension in the tool, though... hadn't tried anything from RA1 so far)

[Nyerguds]

Small update to the viewer: added an option on the remapped palette viewer to filter out only the indices that are untouched by the remap (meaning, where the value on a certain index equals the index itself).  This'll come in handy when recreating filters on the final mrf generator tool

[Nyerguds]

I just finished the UI for the final tool. I need some suggestions on this...

Overview: (left part only; right part is just the viewer)

• The top part, with the icon with the 3 coloured images, shows the name of the project. I might just move this to the title bar, not sure. Anyway, I will probably still need new/open/close/rename buttons for that somewhere. I might add a menu bar for that at the top.
• The dropdown under it, with the icon with the yellow image, will contain the Filters. Each filter represents one remap table.
• The white box under that, with the icon of the image with the coloured magnifying glass, are the different effects (hue/sat/lum/contrast/etc modifiers). Clicking on one of these will immediately show their adjustment bars and options below that, in the empty part with the adjustment slider icon.

Now, all this is pretty much final. The thing that kind of bothers me are these 3 colour palette icons:

• "Manual remap" allows changing colours manually before the filters are applied. Many mrf filters set all water colours to white, so that needs to be reproducible.
• "Sub-palette" allows setting a range of colours to use for the remapping. If used, only these colours will be used for the final filter (or, if the "Exclude" checkbox is enabled, al colours except the selected ones are used) This is needed for the shadow filters (see screenshots above) which only use the last 16 colours on the palette.
• "Never remapped": Quite straightforward. These indices are never touched by the remapping project. They will always map back to their original index. The background black at index 0 is usually excluded that way.

But, yeah... the way these 3 buttons are there kind of bothers me. I'm just not sure if I'd need any kind of indicator to show which stuff is modified by them, or something. Any suggestions are welcome.

[Nyerguds]

First beta version. I've decided to use yellow asterisk icons to indicate that the palette stuff has been modified.

Note that the palette buttons don't work yet, but you can fill in most of their contents automatically by using the "Create project from .mrf" function.

[Nyerguds]

Well. That was easier than expected.

Seems my "hue" control wasn't even necessary for this; just specifying the palette's shadow colours as only colours to use effectively matched it to that colour. This filter gives exactly the same correct effect in both Desert and Temperate

(I'll give a download later, but for now I've done half of this stuff manually in the project ini file rather than making the palette selection dialogs for these palette buttons XD)

One minor annoyance, though: screenshots taken with cnc-ddraw actually capture the palette at that moment, meaning the fading white on the last palette colour is not the correct 252,252,252 value it should be, but some random shade of grey. Though this can be remedied by force-remapping index 255 to colour 15, the pure white Nevermind, force-remapping has no influence on colours set to never be remapped -_-

[Nyerguds]

The tool is finished.

The final version supports command line opening of projects, meaning, if you put the tool on a fixed place, you can assiociate the .mrp extension with it. It also supports drag & drop, of both .mrp and .mrf files.

If you open an .mrf file in the tool that way it will not be used as filter for the viewer, though; it will be opened to generate a project file, with the right set of filters, and some smart scanning options are available to automate detection of stuff like index tables and unchanged colours on the remap tables.

You can find the download here:
FilterCreator_v1.00.rar

This includes two fully finished example projects; the targeting flash when giving an attack / repair / enter command, and the unit shadow. Final goal is, of course, to have all of the .mrf files reproduced that way.

Source code pack
Test data pack

(note that there's no explicit support for the XXXX_VTX.PAL files - you'll have to change the file type to "All Files" to open them.)

[Allen262]

Looks good but something I don't think will be much use for RA1 saddly.

[Kilkakon]

Ditto. It's impressive though, I'll keep it in mind if I make any new terrain palettes.

[Nyerguds]

On 8/23/2014 at 3:38 AM, Allen262 said:

Looks good but something I don't think will be much use for RA1 saddly.

I just wish I'd get my hands on the values (and the exact colour manipulation methods) RA1 uses to generate its internal tables. It would make it peanuts to make all the other projects for this tool -_-

[edit]

The downloads in here are outdated; get the latest version here.